Mr. Splitfoot

A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.

Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who — or what — has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?

In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.

Making good on the extraordinary acclaim for her previous books, Samantha Hunt continues to be “dazzling” (Vanity Fair) and to deliver fiction that is “daring and delicious” (Chicago Tribune).

Editorial Reviews

Review

A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A Publishers Weekly Bestseller
January 2016 Indie Next PickNamed a 2016 Most Anticipated Book in New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Bustle, The Millions, BookPage, National Book Review, BookRiot, Estella’s Revenge, The Week, Refinery“Samantha Hunt’s third novel, MR. SPLITFOOT, will haunt me…I’ve dog-eared so many pages in honor of vivid prose that my advance reader’s copy of MR. SPLITFOOT curls up with fattened corners…the novel moves not just in two time frames, told through two voices, a first-person narrator and a third-, but also…it moves in the fourth dimension, stamping itself upon the reading mind. Hypnotic and glowing, MR. SPLITFOOT insists on its own ghostly presence.”—Gregory Maguire, New York Times Book Review

“The historical and the fantastical entwine like snakes in Samantha Hunt’s fiction…Turned around and around in these woods, you won’t always know where you are, but there’s a rare pleasure in this blend of romance and phantoms.”—Washington Post

“This gripping novel alternates between two story lines: in one, the budding con artists Nat and Ruth struggle to survive in an abusive Christian foster home; in the other, set some years in the future, Ruth, inexplicably rendered mute, leads her niece, Cora, on a journey across New York State on foot. The narratives, which twist together into a shocking dénouement, are marked by ghost stories, from Nat and Ruth’s forays into the world of mediums and séances to Cora’s struggle to piece together her aunt’s past. ‘History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other,’ one character tells Cora, and the novel’s pleasures lie in the intersections between the two.”—New Yorker

“The ghosts of industrial America haunt the author’s picaresque third novel alongside the maybe-supernatural kind. Deep in upstate New York, two orphaned teens break free of the shady Love of Christ! foster home and make a business of claiming to channel the dead; years later, one of them, Ruth, turns up mute and gaunt at the home of her pregnant niece and draws her into a mysterious march along the Erie Canal. The two narratives alternate suspensefully, building a world of hidden forces and untethered souls that feels like the dystopia we already live in.”—Vulture, “7 Books You Need to Read This January”

“Mr. Splitfoot [is] at once an intriguing mystery with clues, suspense, enigmas galore, and an exhilarating, witty, poignant paean to the unexplainable, the unsolvable, the irreducibly mysterious…[Hunt’s] epistemological and ethical rigor are complemented by a lovely respect for what remains uncategorizable, unable to be mastered or explained away.”—The Boston Globe

“Zombies are out, ghosts are in. [Hunt] taps into the cultural zeitgeist with a new novel blurring the natural and supernatural.”—Wall Street Journal, “Six Books to Curl Up With This Winter”

“The way I feel about Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot is how one of its characters describes meeting his wife: ‘We fell in love in a bloody way, thorns and hooks’…Ruth’s and Cora’s experiences of that landscape are like hallucinatory expeditions through a gothic wasteland. Somewhere along the way, Hunt conned me into believing that temporary possession by a hellish demon isn’t, after all, so different from the crucible of motherhood.”—The Paris Review, Staff Pick

“Hunt mixes her gothic ingredients with great skill, and throws in some quirky contemporary twists for good measure…The result is a riveting, linguistically playful tale about demons (real or imagined), loss, magic and motherhood.”—Financial Times

“Hunt’s back with a modern gothic starring a scam-artist orphan who claims to talk to the dead; his sister who ages into a strange, silent woman; and, later, her pregnant niece, who follows her aunt on a trek across New York without exactly knowing why. Also featured: meteorites, a runaway nun, a noseless man, and a healthy dash of humor. Although it’s still too early to speculate on the prize-winning potential of Mr. Splitfoot, Hunt’s fantastical writing is already drawing favorable comparisons to Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, and her elegantly structured novel promises to be the year’s most unusual ghost story.”—The Millions, “Most Anticipated: The Great 2016 Book Preview”

“Mr. Splitfoot is going to be a wild ride. If you’re all about magical realists like Kelly Link, this is one title you’ll need to pick up, because Samantha Hunt’s third novel takes the banal and rockets it into the fantastic (and the fantastically wonderful). I don’t want to divulge too much about this one because I’d rather you read it yourself, but I will say that if you love dual narrative structures or complicated timelines, this is an especially good pick for your must-read list.”—Bustle, “17 Of 2016’s Most Anticipated Books To Put On Your Wishlist Immediately”